By KEVIN DOLAK, OLIVIA KATRANDJIAN and COLLEEN CURRY
Aug. 28, 2011
Irene made landfall in Coney Island, N.Y., at 8:45 a.m. this morning as a tropical storm with 65 mph winds, but by 10 a.m. patches of blue sky and sunshine began peeking through in lower Manhattan.

What might the percentage of limbs lost to hurricanes versus lost to snow load be in Montreal? Having been tutored in the ferocity of hurricanes by Agnes that blue tarp on your jeep tells me you missed the meat.
If a tree falls in Canada can FEMA hear it?

LA Times:
In Irene's wake: Relief despite damage and deaths
Los Angeles Times -
As Hurricane Irene approached, spectacular satellite images encouraged some to fear the worst. But now, as the weakened storm moseys from New York into New England, you can't see a sigh of relief from outer space.

No, it encouraged NBC to do a two hour newscast Friday night and promising full on air coverage throughout Saturday. I never saw a sign of anything beyond regular programming.

With four months left in the year, President Obama has declared 66 major disasters alone, which puts him on pace to surpass the record of 81, which he set last year, says Matt Mayer, president of the Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions, a conservative think-tank based in Ohio, which tracks such declarations. Previously, Clinton in 1996 and George W. Bush in 2008 tied for the record for major disaster declarations, which stood at 75.

This trend, says Mayer, shows a federalization of natural disasters, in which costs for damages are shifted from the state in which they occur to the rest of the states and taxpayers in each. "We are incenting mayors and governors to defund emergency management, and we're making FEMA an agency, as a routine, that has little time for the catastrophic," he says. "There's an enormous pressure for FEMA to prove that it's fixed what was not working during Katrina, so that's why there's this overhyping to jump the gun on that. For the president, he's looking at poll numbers, and he has to be seen as a leader and in charge. This was a good opportunity for him to do that, and he did."

In the days after Irene, which happened almost exactly six years after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf coast in 2005, several members of Congress, state governors, and the media?even some of the president's biggest critics, like New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie*?praised both FEMA and the president for their preparedness this time around. "So far, FEMA has been very responsive," said Christie on the This Week program Sunday, adding to a comment he made last week that Obama "deserves great credit for the way FEMA operated in this storm."

Quote:

Though Irene is the most recent disaster to sweep through the country, only three eastern states and Puerto Rico make it on the list. Tornadoes and severe flooding throughout the South and Midwest earlier this year led to most of the declarations. It is important to note that since the size and scope of FEMA actions and federal funding that comes with each declaration differs considerably, this list may not fully represent which states suffered most, nor where the federal government devoted the most attention.